Wednesday, February 09, 2011

The Big Question: Do right-wingers want the American experiment to continue?

Tea Party fascism emerged alongside -- not in reaction to -- the continuing Obama sell-out to conservatism. The right has won the national debate; the only remaining question is which flavor of right-wingerism will predominate.

This situation forces us to ask an important question: What do the right-wingers want?

Previously, conservatism was linked to flag-waving nationalism. Today, many on the right cannot go ten minutes without discussing secession and revolution. Now that they've conquered the union, they want to end it.

No matter how thoroughly Obama sells out Democratic principles, the right-wing propaganda machine keeps pretending that all Democrats, and Obama in particular, are socialists. Anyone who advocates a social program that Ayn Rand might have disliked -- including Social Security and Medicare -- stands damned as a bloody Bolshie. No reconciliation is possible.

Meanwhile, an inane mythology has grown up around Ronald Reagan. The conservatives who created this myth won't tell you that Reagan doubled the national budget, routinely sent budgets to congress that were larger than the ones that congress approved, increased the annual national debt from $89 billion to $432 billion, transformed the United States from the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation, passed the largest tax increase in American history in 1982, created massive corruption by deregulating the Savings and Loans, instituted a drug policy which created prison overcrowding by refusing to distinguish between what were then called "hard" and "soft" drugs, and ran the most corrupt administration to be found outside the Grant and Dubya years. Despite years of fawning media support for Ronald Reagan, his poll numbers were not nearly so high as many now believe; in 1992, more people had a favorable impression of Jimmy Carter.

Carter, incidentally, was almost as bad as Obama. Both were/are Republicans in Dem disguises, as the aforelinked must-read stories demonstrate.

For more than thirty years, a Milton Friedmanite weltanschauung has ruled our political discourse -- and the nation's economic strength keeps ebbing. Our jobs are gone; the middle class is gone. Our hopes are gone.

We could save ourselves by reintroducing progressive taxes, by nationalizing the "too big to fail" banks, by renouncing free trade agreements, and by allowing the government to invest massively in new industries. Alas, an omnipotent propaganda infrastructure renders all such solutions unthinkable. Every time you hop on the internet or turn on the teevee, you run into a well-paid YAL (Yet Another Libertarian) telling you that the best way to quench the inferno is to pour on still more gasoline supplied by AynCo..

We've kept this country alive by lurching from financial bubble to financial bubble. There may be no bubbles left.

The question comes down to this: Does the right-wing actually want America to end? Is the doctor merely incompetent, or is he trying to murder the patient?

Do the ultra-righties want to keep the afflicted entity dazed, diseased, and decaying? A mortally ill individual cannot stop invaders from stripping his household. Maybe our rulers have decided to rob the dying instead of attempting a revival.

When "the European Project" was conceived a goal was to contain Germany—create a European Germany as an alternative to the other possibility, a German Europe.

For a while it looked as if the founders had succeeded, especially when they created the euro as the most important step toward the replacement of nation states with a European Union, or at least a euro zone. Then came the financial crisis in the periphery countries, and the emergence of Germany as the principal source of funds to prevent (postpone, or conceal, would be more accurate descriptions) the restructuring of the debts of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and perhaps Spain and Italy, not to mention Belgium, home of the burgeoning eurocracy, and a nation seemingly incapable of forming a government of its own.

Now, the member states of the euro zone, and indeed the entire EU, are confronting the possibility that their effort to subsume Germany in a united Europe is about to fail, and a Europe dancing to the German tune—a German Europe—is about to emerge.

Note, please, that Germany is in a position to do these things precisely because it is not run by laissez faire zealots. The closest thing to a libertarian party in Germany is the FDP, which has been (more accurately) called the "yellow socialist" party. No-one with true power and influence in Germany wants an end to protectionism or socialized health insurance.

"Anyone who advocates a social program that Ayn Rand might have disliked -- including Social Security and Medicare"

As Patia Stephens (http://www.patiastephens.com/2010/12/05/ayn-rand-received-social-security-medicare) and Michael Ford (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ford/ayn-rand-and-the-vip-dipe_b_792184.html), Rand's dislike of Social Security and Medicare was not sufficiently strong to prevent her from accepting benefits from both of those programs. ;-) It was, however, apparently sufficient to make her register for benefits under the name "Ann O'Connor" rather than "Ayn Rand" or her birthname, Alisa Rosenbaum.

What they want is a kind of monarchy-- entitlements passed to descendants-- and the economic enslavement of all of us who are genetically blessed of their direct linage. Once they get established well enough, we'll start having titles and forbidden colors.